They were soon joined by another party of top brass who had flown in from Pearl Harbor two days before, including Commander in Chief, Pacific, Admiral Arthur Radford and MacArthur’s friend Marine General Lemuel Shepherd.
All of them knew the outline of MacArthur’s plan; all of them had different reactions. Shepherd was CHROMITE’s keen supporter; Collins was completely convinced it was a mistake. Edwards’s attitude was more wait-and-see, depending on MacArthur’s presentation. As for Sherman, MacArthur himself believed the admiral’s vote would be the most decisive.1 If he could sway the old veteran of half a dozen campaigns in the Pacific war, MacArthur reasoned, the navy chief would carry the others with him.
That afternoon they all assembled at SCAP GHQ in the late afternoon in a small conference room—too small for the number of important people there. Besides the guests from Washington and Pearl and MacArthur himself, there were also his chief of staff, General Almond; his G-3, Pinky Wright; General Stratemeyer; naval commanders Strubel and Doyle; and a flock of staffers and briefing officers. For reasons that are still obscure, two people were missing from the room: MacArthur’s most skeptical critic, Marine general Smith, and his fiercest supporter, Marine general Shepherd. If MacArthur did manage to sway the Joint Chiefs, he would have to do it without Shepherd’s help.
MacArthur sat silently fingering his pipe as Wright laid out the basic plan of CHROMITE. Then Doyle’s naval briefers took over, outlining the naval and amphibious aspects of the plan; their analysis was, as the official account of the meeting puts it, “decidedly pessimistic.” Then came Admiral Doyle himself, speaking of the immense difficulties of sailing ships up the main channel leading into Inchon, which might be mined or covered by heavy batteries, or both—no one knew. One American ship sunk in a channel that narrow could doom the whole operation.
Admiral Sherman then interjected, “I wouldn’t hesitate to take a ship up there.”
MacArthur smiled and spoke for the first time. “Spoken like a Farragut!”
Doyle ignored the outburst. He concluded by saying that in his opinion the Inchon landing was “not impossible”—hardly a ringing endorsement.2
Then it was Lawton Collins’s turn. He outlined his objections as MacArthur again sat silently, his pipe gripped tightly in his teeth. Collins pointed out that the Inchon plan meant stripping the Pusan perimeter of the First Marine Brigade, which would leave General Walker’s men unnecessarily exposed to a sudden North Korean attack. Even supposing that the Marine landing succeeded and MacArthur managed to drive on to Seoul, it was Collins’s personal belief that MacArthur would be too far away to link up with Walker, and that if the Communists counterattacked he could easily find himself trapped with no hope of relief.
He strongly urged considering a landing instead at Kunsan, one hundred miles south of Inchon, which was closer to the Eighth Army’s position. Otherwise, if MacArthur failed to make “a quick junction” with Walker, the result in Collins’s opinion would be a “disaster.”
The conference room fell silent. MacArthur’s chief of staff, Almond, shifted uneasily in his chair. The tension and the temperature in the small space rose steadily.
MacArthur said nothing, barely moved, for an entire minute. Then he rose and began walking back and forth. What followed was classic MacArthur, with the fate of an entire war hanging in the balance.
“The bulk of the Reds are committed around Walker’s defense perimeter,” he began. “The enemy, I am convinced, has failed to prepare Inchon properly for defense.”
He plunged on to say that the very argument that critics like Collins and Doyle were advancing was precisely why the North Koreans would not expect a landing at Inchon. “Like Montcalm,” he said, referring to the French general who failed to defend Quebec during the French and Indian War against a surprise assault by British general Wolfe, “the North Koreans would regard an Inchon landing as impossible. Like Wolfe, I could take them by surprise.”
As he warmed to his subject, MacArthur’s pacing became more animated, his gestures more grandiloquent.
“The Navy’s objections as to tides, hydrography, terrain, and physical handicaps are indeed substantial and pertinent,” he said, even as he waved those objections aside. “My confidence in the Navy is complete, and in fact,” he said without glancing at Admiral Doyle, “I seem to have more confidence in the Navy than the Navy has in itself.”3
He had now spoken for forty-five minutes without a single note. Every eye in the room was riveted on him.
“The only alternative to a stroke such as I propose will be the continuation of the savage sacrifice we are making at Pusan, with no hope of relief in sight. Are you content to let our troops stay in that bloody perimeter like beef cattle in the slaughterhouse? Who will take responsibility for such a tragedy?”
There was silence.
“I certainly will not. The prestige of the Western world hangs in the balance. Oriental millions”—that racial reference would make later historians cringe—“are watching the outcome. It is plainly apparent that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.”
His peroration brought the issue back to operational reality.
“If my estimate is inaccurate and should I run into a defense with which I cannot cope, I will be there personally and will immediately withdraw our forces before they are committed to a bloody setback. The only loss then will be my professional reputation. But Inchon will not fail. Inchon will succeed. And it will save 100,000 lives.”
According to witnesses, he then spoke of the ticking clock of destiny, as his eyes grew wide and more determined. “I realize that Inchon is a 5000-to-one gamble, but I am used to taking such odds. We shall land at Inchon and we shall crush them.”
Everyone in the room was stunned. Even Collins, his biggest critic, sat immobilized as he watched MacArthur “gradually building up emphasis with consummate skill.” Finally Forrest Sherman broke the silence by standing and saying, “Thank you. A great voice in a great cause.”4
MacArthur had thought that Sherman was one of the doubters he had to win over. In fact, unbeknownst to him, on August 21 Sherman had confessed to Admiral Arthur Strubel, who had served under MacArthur during the Philippine campaign and who now had overall responsibility for CHROMITE, “I’m going to back the Inchon operation completely. I think it’s sound.” But even after MacArthur’s impassioned presentation, the navy chief told a staffer, “I which I could share that man’s optimism.”
Lawton Collins found himself in a more difficult situation. He knew MacArthur’s own generals opposed the plan. Even though he had to admit he had been deeply impressed by MacArthur’s presentation, he still worried that everything would go wrong. Together with Smith, Doyle, Radford, and even Shepherd, Collins remained convinced that Inchon was the wrong place for a landing, and that Posung-Myon was the right place. After listening, Admiral Sherman agreed and revisited the Posung-Myon idea again with the commander in chief, United Nations Forces, the next day. Shepherd, his devoted fan, took up the same refrain.5
But MacArthur refused to budge. Why was MacArthur so adamant? There can be only one explanation. Inchon was closer to Seoul, and MacArthur believed that when American forces liberated the Korean capital it would change the entire direction of the war. As with the Philippines and Manila, freeing a nation’s capital transcended matters of strategy. In MacArthur’s mind, it was a decisive act in the nation’s destiny, a turning point in its future and for its people. To have American soldiers and marines carry it out would shape America’s future in Asia, MacArthur believed. As with Japan, a new future was dawning—and here in South Korea he would be destiny’s instrument, as he had been in Japan.
So on August 30 MacArthur nailed down his final operational orders for CHROMITE with virtually no changes. Meanwhile, a chastened Sherman and Collins had returned to Washington recommending that MacArthur’s plan be endorsed, with two provisos. The first was that he have “alternati
ve plans” for a landing at Kunsan or some other beach south of Inchon if things went awry, and the second was that he keep the Joint Chiefs better informed in future “as to your intentions and plans for offensive operations.”
A happy MacArthur accepted the provisos without a grumble. He had won his fight; even the fiercest doubters had reluctantly gone along. Now there was only the preparation, and the waiting.
In the meantime, the North Koreans were on the move again.
—
They struck on the night of August 31–September 1 in an all-out attack on the Pusan perimeter. The KPA assault was aimed at a worn-out, over-extended Eighth Army, one that was reduced by disease, fatigue, and hunger to lashing out at the multiple attempts at a breakthrough, instead of carrying out an overall strategic plan. Jim Edwards, battalion commander of second battalion, Twenty-third Infantry, watched as his men gradually became dispirited even though their line did not fall apart.
North Korean officers personally led the human wave assaults; Edwards saw one shot seventeen times before he finally went down. After two days of fighting off the attacks without sleep, Edwards’s men began to collapse; some cried, some sat paralyzed, some tried to shoot back but shook so violently they couldn’t hold a weapon. Artillery barrages sprayed Edwards’s sector with KPA body parts, on which the rats feasted after dark.6
Yet somehow the perimeter held. General Walker told his men there was no retreat, because there was nowhere to go.
“We must fight to the end.” If they had to die, he said, “at least we die fighting together.”
Then on September 3 Walker began a counterattack with MacArthur’s authorization, including the First Marine brigade that soon would be withdrawn to become part of the Inchon landing. The marines fought hard and well; they lost 200 men in retaking the so-called Naktong Bulge. When they finally left Pusan, they had lost more than 900 effectives since August. Jim Edwards’s battalion’s weapons company had suffered 70 percent casualties.
All the same, by September 7 the North Korean offensive was spent. The Pusan perimeter was safe for now. But if MacArthur was going to rescue the men of the Eighth Army and their South Korean allies, it had to be soon.
On September 12 MacArthur climbed aboard the amphibious command ship USS Mount McKinley, as he had so many warships just before amphibious landings on Los Negros, Hollandia, Morotai, Leyte, Luzon…This would be his last. The Mount McKinley was Admiral Doyle’s flagship, moored at Sasebo harbor in Japan. Joining him were Almond, Wright, and Whitney, as well as Lemuel Shepherd. On the drive over from Tokyo they had noticed a rainbow breaking through in the leaden evening sky.
“That’s my rainbow!” MacArthur excitedly told Shepherd. “I commanded the Rainbow Division in the first war. That’s my lucky omen. Lem, this operation is going to be a success.”7
On board the Mount McKinley they shook hands with Doyle and General Smith, and then at midnight set sail for Inchon.
The seas were heavy during the early-morning hours. They were passing through the edge of a typhoon, “one of the worst storms I ever met,” Doyle recalled later. It packed winds of up to 125 miles per hour but then moved off to the east, missing the main body of invasion ships. MacArthur’s luck was still holding.8
He himself did not hold up so well. Doyle later admitted he had steered into the typhoon’s edge deliberately, to give his commanding general “a taste of ocean warfare.” It also brought MacArthur a bout of seasickness—together with the nervous stomach he usually got just before a crisis. Whitney found him in his cabin huddled in his “A” bathrobe, looking and feeling miserable. Whitney and Pinky Wright convinced him to have a dram of Scotch to steady his stomach. MacArthur did so, immediately felt better, and after chatting a while, went to sleep.9
By the afternoon, the seas smoothed out and that evening MacArthur took a walk on deck, dressed in his leather aviator’s jacket. He watched the sun set beyond China on the ship’s port side. “I had made many landings before,” he recalled thinking, “but this was the most intricately complicated amphibious operation I had ever attempted.”
Around him were 260 ships from six nations—America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, and France. They were loaded with some 70,000 personnel, including the First Marine Division and the Seventh Infantry Division, which now had some 8,000 Korean troops integrated into its ranks to beef up its numbers.
CHROMITE had been a triumph of logistical and administrative skill. Now they would find out if it was a triumph of military strategy as well.
Yet even after MacArthur’s dramatic conference on the 23rd, it almost didn’t happen. On September 7—less than a week before the invasion armada was supposed to sail—he received a message from the Joint Chiefs asking him once again to consider calling off the landings. They urged him to think about sending the troops to reinforce Walker’s hard-pressed forces on the Pusan perimeter (they did not know that the North Korean attacks had already failed).
The message “chilled me to the marrow of my bones,” MacArthur admitted, and he quickly penciled a polite but firm reply: “I regard the chance of success of the operation as excellent. I go further in belief that it represents the only hope of wresting the initiative from the enemy and thereby presenting the opportunity for a decisive blow.” There was also no chance that the Pusan perimeter would collapse. Once MacArthur landed in the north, he predicted, the North Koreans would collapse instead.
The alternative was a long, grinding war of attrition on the Korean peninsula, he said. He was telling the Joint Chiefs in stark terms: it’s this, or nothing.10
On the 8th the Chiefs gave up. They officially authorized the operation, just days before the marines were supposed to hit the beaches. Privately, MacArthur believed it was the president who tried to block his plan at the last minute. He was determined not to let him or the Joint Chiefs interfere again. He sent a copy of CHROMITE’s detailed instructions to Washington as requested, but made sure it arrived too late for anyone to order the landings stopped.11
Now the waiting was almost over.
“Next morning we would have to thread our way over the shifting bars of ‘Flying Fish Channel,’ ” MacArthur was thinking in the gathering darkness. That was the main channel leading into Inchon. Then “under the guns of Wolmi-do” island, they would have to “skirt the edges of the deadly mud banks that stretched for 2 miles across the harbor.”
That night he could barely sleep. At quarter to two he took another turn around the blacked-out ship, and watched the phosphorescent seas breaking across the Mount McKinley’s prow. “Within five hours,” he realized, 40,000 men would be landing at Inchon, in order to save 100,000 still trapped in the Pusan perimeter.
“I alone was responsible for tomorrow, and if I failed, the dreadful results would rest on judgment day against my soul.”12
Suddenly a light flashed out of the darkness.
Startled, MacArthur wondered what it was, just as it flashed again. It couldn’t be a ship; every ship in the fleet was blacked out. Then he realized: the channel navigation lights had been left on. The North Koreans still didn’t know what was about to hit them. The Inchon invasion force had achieved complete surprise.
He went back to bed with a lighter heart than he had felt for days.
—
But he didn’t have much time for sleep.
A roar like distant thunder woke him up. “Our guns had opened up on Wolmi-do,” he wrote later. He hastily dressed and went up on deck. Ten American and British cruisers and destroyers were pounding the 335-foot hill that dominated the island. The North Korean guns had fired back at first, then ceased. As MacArthur watched, dark-blue marine Corsair fighter-bombers “swooped down from the clouds and added their strafing to the destruction.” Some were also unloading napalm in bright spectacular bursts as thousands of marines boarded their landing craft from their mother ships.
MacArthur, Doyle, and the rest watched through binoculars as the first landing craft carrying troops
from the Fifth Marines, made their way to the north end of Wolmi-do. It was 6:30 A.M. The marines landed to little resistance. By 7:00 they had run up the American flag on Wolmi-Do.
That was one obstacle out of the way. Then marines swarmed over the other island in the channel, Sowolmi-do. The garrison there fought harder, but soon also threw up their hands and surrendered. So far the marines had not suffered a single fatality. They had killed more than 200 of the enemy and taken 140 prisoners, at the cost of 17 wounded.13
When word got back to the Mount McKinley, MacArthur turned to Doyle.
“Please send a message to the fleet,” he said, and to Admiral Strubel on board the cruiser Rochester. “The Navy and Marines have never shone more brightly than this morning. MacArthur.” Then he turned to Shepherd, Smith, and Almond. “That’s it. Let’s get a cup of coffee.”
They headed below. The main landings still had hours to go, but MacArthur felt certain now that success was assured. After breakfast he dictated an update for the Joint Chiefs.
“First phase landing successful with losses slight. Surprise apparently complete. All goes well and on schedule.”14
It was good that MacArthur was so confident, because there was still plenty that could go wrong.
With Wolmi-do captured, the invasion fleet now had to wait for hours while the deep tide ebbed, leaving great exposed mudflats that would have trapped the marine landing craft if they had arrived a few hours later. The fleet itself would have been in serious trouble if the North Koreans had laid a large batch of new Soviet magnetic anti-ship mines that had arrived in Inchon a week or so before; but the North Koreans hadn’t. It was MacArthur luck yet again.15
The North Koreans, however, were beginning to recover from the shock and surprise of the attack, and started tattooing the Marines on Wolmi-do with artillery fire from the mainland. There were several tense hours until 5:30 P.M. when the tidal flow finally allowed the two main assaults to get under way, one headed for the northwest edge of Inchon, code-named Red Beach, and the other for Blue Beach, south of the main part of town.
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